Signalling Pathways 2016 – Personalised Medicine

ELCC 2016 – Lung Cancer

Mark you diaries now for ELCC 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. 13-16 April 2016

IMPAKT 2016 – Breast Cancer

Save the date for the IMPAKT 2016 breast cancer conference: 12-14 May 2016

ESMO 2016 Congress

Mark you diaries now for ESMO 2016 in Copenhagen, Denmark. 7-11 October 2016

ESMO 2017 Congress

Save the date for ESMO 2017: 8-12 September 2017 in Madrid, Spain

Preceptorship Meetings

Educational events on specific topics or cancer types and aim to provide a learning experience and training for young oncologists

Workshops & Courses

ESMO fosters the advancement of cancer research by supporting clinical trials workshops to inspire young oncologists from different disciplines across the globe to become the next generation of active researchers.

Patient Guides

Our cervical cancer, endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer patient guides are now available in Italian

Personalised Medicine Explained

Video interviews and articles designed to help patients, policy makers and other non-medical professionals better understand the principles of personalised cancer medicine

Getting the Most out of Your Oncologist

Now available in Greek, our Guide for Patients with Advanced Cancer is designed for patients, their family members and oncologists.

Designated Centres of Integrated Oncology and Palliative Care

The ESMO Designated Centres of Integrated Oncology and Palliative Care accreditation programme recognises cancer centres which provide comprehensive services in supportive and palliative care as part of their routine care.

The monoclonal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibody bevacizumab has recently received considerable attention from neuro-oncologists. Bevacizumab has demonstrated high radiographic response rates, a decreased need for corticosteroids and temporary improvement in neurological function in glioblastoma patients in several uncontrolled studies. In a pivotal trial overall survival of patients with recurrent glioblastoma treated with bevacizumab was 9.2 months (95% confidence interval 8.2 to 10.7), with 42.6% (confidence interval 29.6 to 55.5%) of patients alive and progression-free at six months. Based on these results, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provisionally approved bevacizumab for the use in recurrent glioblastoma. Two large multinational phase III trials are currently evaluating the efficacy of bevacizumab in addition to standard adjuvant chemo-radiotherapy in newly diagnosed glioblastoma.

A number of new radiological phenomena including changes in contrast media uptake, perfusion, apparent diffusion coefficients and metabolic activity have recently been described in glioblastoma patients undergoing bevacizumab therapy. In the paper by Bähr et al., another previously unknown and particularly interesting neuroradiological feature is documented in such patients. Bähr et al. demonstrate that up to 60% of glioblastoma patients develop tumour calcifications within few weeks after initiation of bevacizumab therapy. These changes are apparent as hyperintense lesions on standard T1-weighted magnetic resonance images and were confirmed as tumour calcifications using computed tomography. Intriguingly, the prognosis of patients developing such tumour calcifications was significantly better than that of patients without calcifications both with regard to progression-free and overall survival times. The mechanism of tumour calcification as an effect of bevacizumab therapy in glioblastoma has not been experimentally addressed in the present work, but the authors speculate that they may origin from changes in tumour blood vessels induced by VEGF blockage. In sum, the data presented by Bähr et al. are interesting, as they may introduce a new and easily assessable neuroradiologcial biomarker for bevacizumab-treated glioblastoma patients. It will be interesting to validate their findings in further prospectively collected patient cohorts, e.g. the patients enrolled in the two ongoing large phase III trials evaluating bevacizumab in newly diagnosed glioblastoma.